Music scene: McMurtry tour hits area next week

Saturday

Oct 21, 2017 at 6:00 AMOct 22, 2017 at 4:29 PM

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

James McMurtry is a master at writing songs that capture the struggles and sometimes doomed tenacity of forgotten Americans, the middle classes and lower classes battling a changing economy and changing world around them.

McMurtry’s current tour has only one New England stop, next Wednesday at Brighton Music Hall.

His 2004 song “We Can’t Make It Here” deftly captured the desperation of people whose livelihoods and future seemed lost in the shuffle of fast-shifting economic factors. At the time that tune was seen as a critique of George W. Bush-era economic stagnation, and a bit later his “Cheney’s Toy” suggested that Bush was simply manipulated by his vice president.

With that kind of topical commentary as prelude, was McMurtry surprised by the last election, or anything that has happened since?

“Surprised, no, not at all,” said McMurtry from his home near Austin. “I had been driving around the country, seeing a lot of yard signs.”

Do current conditions tempt him to pen some more topical songs, especially since his last album, “Complicated Game,” came out at the end of 2015, well before the election?

“I don’t really ever set out to write or play songs with a particular political point of view,” McMurtry said. “I think if you do that, you end up writing a sermon. ‘We Can’t Make It Here’ is more about those two people and how they try to figure out the rest of their lives. It was interesting how that song was seen as anti-Bush when it came out, and then, in more recent years, the right embraced that song. For many people, none of those conditions had changed. I was seeing it used on all kinds of right-wing memes, and sites. Then, a few weeks ago, I posted a video of Trump at the airport unable to find his limo, distracted by something sparkly, I guess. Immediately, I got all that old hate mail back again.”

McMurtry is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry, and he was raised in Texas until the age of 7, when his parents divorced and he and his mother moved to Virginia. But James McMurtry has long since moved back to Texas and forged a unique career with his deadpan delivery, and detailed, poetic vignettes of people and places, framed by folk-rock and country-rock. He’s carved out a special niche among heartland songwriters, almost since his 1989 debut “Too Long In the Wasteland” (produced by John Mellencamp). It’s not a huge stretch to suggest he’s in the same business as his father, except his stories are about five minutes long.

Some of the songs on “Complicated Game” are especially riveting, like the harrowing “South Dakota,” which depicts a soldier going home to help run his family cattle farm, which runs into tragedy due to a blizzard and leaves them broke. Or the old fishermen on “Carlisle’s Haul,” desperate for some extra money from illegal net-fishing at night.

“It’s long been a belief out here in the middle of the country that certain things, like switching to Texaco Unleaded, or needing a catalytic converter on your car, are just not the government’s business,” McMurtry pointed out, “because you don’t see any benefits right away. Some people live in a completely different reality, where very few can connect their cancer to the chemical plant down the street. A much earlier song of mine, ‘The 12 O’clock Whistle,’ dealt with these trucks that used to be driving down the streets spraying DDT, for pest control, and everybody thought it was fine because they weren’t aware of the effects.”

One interesting tune with not quite that much stark reality is “Long Island Sound,’ where a fellow in suburban New York reflects on, and even yearns for, his Texas roots, while also knowing his work and family demand he stay right where he is. McMurtry aptly depicts that sense of dislocation.

“Well, I moved from Texas to Virginia when I was a kid, and when I came back to Texas I didn’t fit in that well,” McMurtry related. “How that song came about is that my son graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, and I went up to New York for his graduation. Coming back, our Google maps thing sent us over the Whitestone Bridge by mistake, and sitting there in traffic I just began playing with those lines, imagining this guy’s life. It all just kind of fit together, this story of someone who had to go for a corporate reload up north.”

McMurtry’s son Curtis McMurtry is a songwriter himself, with his own album out, but his dad didn’t push him into a music career.

“There are several differences between us,” McMurtry noted. “Curt is so much taller than me, and has a lot more musical knowledge. His music is really not much like mine at all. He has a degree in ethnomusicology, and has made a real study of musical roots and how styles develop, and he decided to do that songwriting thing on his own as a result. That’s not how I did it. For me, I just loved Johnny Cash and worked backwards from there.”

So, it has been a while between albums, and McMurtry must be looking towards the next one?

“I’m still picking at stuff,” he said. “I have many scraps of songs that I keep writing down on pieces of paper, and eventually those scraps grow into songs. The music business has turned upside-down since I started, where now we just put out records to support our touring, because record sales for their own sake have dried up. The creative process has to be different, because you can’t just stop touring and do a record, so you have to do it in bits and pieces.”

“I’ve never done a record like that before,” McMurtry said, laughing, “and I might not again. We got some really clean guitar tracks on that one, with no bleeds whatsoever, and it did sound great. But the process was so damned tedious. I think for the next one I want to go back to the old band-in-a-room-together live approach. I do have one unrecorded song from that album’s batch, which I do pretty early in my set, since it’s faster than most of my tunes.”

Before heading out on this leg of his tour, McMurtry was diverting to Tucson to play on a benefit concert for refugees, where he’d be taking the stage along with Steve Earle, Joan Baez, and Patty Griffin.

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